For one second, the bottom of Mav’s World was as bright as noon.
He saw the 12 domes on the field of stones, with their strange skies. Between them, he saw his silver army and the long white body of the eel. Above him, the owls hung with their wings spread, close enough to touch.
Then the light was gone, and seven of the owls were falling.
Seven’s lightning didn’t kill them, because rank C beasts were too strong for that. But it locked every muscle in their bodies for three full seconds. Their skins of salt air couldn’t hold together without wings beating inside them, so the skins tore open. Seven great owls fell into his sea like wet sheets.
The needlefish were on them before they reached the seabed.
The other five owls pulled up, screaming. It was the first sound that Mav had heard them make. The scream wasn’t loud, but it went straight into his head, and for a moment, his whole body went numb. Around him, his fish staggered in the water.
Rhea’s owls had a second skill, and they had just used it.
Mav shook his head until the numbness passed. When he looked up again, Rhea was walking to the edge of her salt plain.
-----
She didn’t come out, because she didn’t need to.
Her hunting cats came out instead. They were gray, long-legged and tailless, and each of them was as big as Birch. There were only six of them, but they moved through the water faster than any beast should have been able to. They went straight for Tamsin’s forest.
Rhea had studied every duel that he had ever fought. She knew that Tamsin’s moths could blind a whole field, so she was removing them first.
Mav felt a flash of real fear. He couldn’t warn Tamsin, because sound didn’t carry from his water into her dome.
Tamsin had been watching Rhea too. When the cats reached the edge of her forest, every moth on her branches opened its wings at once. At the bottom of a World with no light, the flash was like a sun.
The cats were blind for 10 seconds. That was enough for Ronald. He brought his whole herd from the north side, inside their skins of mountain air, like a falling wall. Ronald ran with them, shouting. Two of the cats went down under the boars. The others turned back toward the salt plain, but one of them caught Ronald across the forehead with a claw as it passed.
Ronald fell. Then he got up, furious, and went on shouting.
It was the moment that Mav had been waiting for.
’Sela. The ash plain.’
The four collared Reefkin had left the dome. They stood together on the field of stones with their hands raised, and they did what they had practiced every evening for two weeks. They lifted a column of his sea as thick as a tree. Then they drove it into the dome of the ash plain, at the place where Ronald’s boars had bent it.
The edge broke.
Black water poured onto the gray ash. The man in the middle of the plain shouted and ran for his arch, which still hung open above his ground. Two hundred needlefish came in with the water, and they reached him first.
Mav didn’t watch.
When an Awakened died, his Manifestation died with him. The gray ash and the red sky simply faded. In their place, there was only dark water, with a body falling slowly to the seabed. Above it, the ring of pale light closed and was gone.
That was the first one.
-----
After that, it was a matter of time, and the raiders knew it.
They were rank D, and in an open field, most of them were stronger than he was. But they were standing in small pieces of their own Worlds, at the bottom of a sea that belonged to him. Their beasts had to leave the domes to reach him. Every beast that left a dome had a skin of air that his fish could tear.
Some of them tried to run. A woman on the red rock turned toward her arch as soon as the ash plain fell. Moss, Fern and Reed had crept out of the Tangle during the first wave, a few steps at a time. They had been lying among the stones beside her dome ever since. When the Reefkin tore its edge open, the three stalkers went in with the water. The woman never saw them.
Two of the raiders tried to yield. They shouted it across the field with their hands raised, and Mav heard them clearly when the Reefkin carried his water into their domes.
He was angry, but the anger was cold. These people had come to his home at night to kill his fish and take his stone. Now they wanted to go home.
He thought of Quill’s hands, flat and steady on her desk.
’Every one of them has seen my sea, my city and my Heartstone.’
He didn’t let them leave.
It took most of the night, and Mav was in the middle of all of it. When the water broke a dome, he went in himself with his harpoon and three borrowed skills, changing them as he needed them. He used Discharge each time that it was ready. He used Frost Breath on the water under the arches, so that nobody could swim up to them through the ice.
The first raider that he killed with his own hands was a big man on the red rock with an axe. Mav’s lightning locked him for a heartbeat. Before he could lift the axe again, Mav put the harpoon through his throat. He killed three more before dawn. He knew that he would remember each of their faces, but he didn’t look away from any of them.
Birch broke the dome of the ferns alone. Oak, Ivy and Elm hunted along the edges of the other domes as a pack, the way they had in the marsh, going for the back legs of anything that came out. Log waited in the mud between the domes for whatever ran past him. The two spitters shot water up into the domes, into the eyes of anything that tried to fly. Ronald lost two boars, but he didn’t stop. Tamsin’s moths flashed until their wings were dim.
When the last of the 11 hired raiders died, the sea was very dark. There was only one dome left on the field of stones.
It was the salt plain.
-----
The Reefkin broke its edge an hour before dawn, and the needlefish went in with the water. When Mav walked in after them, Rhea Calder was sitting on the white ground.
The Reefkin held the edge open behind him. The needlefish waited in a silver wall. Two of her gray cats lay dead at her feet. Her last owls lay on the salt with their wings broken, and they didn’t try to rise.
She had a long, deep wound in her side, where Two’s jaws had caught her. She was pressing her hand against it. Her face was pale, and her breathing was shallow. But she looked up at him with the same calm, polite expression that she always wore.
"Eleven hired fighters of rank D and a hunter of rank C," she said. "Lord Ashgrove paid for all of it. He said that it would be enough to take your stone."
"It wasn’t."
"No. You let the bears reach it." She almost smiled. "I should have seen that coming."
Mav stood over her with his harpoon in his hand. A free seaweed hung at his belt in its canteen. He had brought it in case a strong beast fell and could still be saved. Now he understood, as clearly as he had ever understood anything, that it would work on her. She was hurt and weak, so the lock would turn.
He would have a rank C host who knew everything that Aldric Ashgrove knew.
The thought disgusted him. He didn’t open the canteen, and he didn’t even want to.
"You know what I’m going to do," he said.
"Yes. I knew it when I came here." She looked at the black water around her dome. "Lord Ashgrove holds my mother and my brothers. If I had refused him, he would have hurt them. If I die here, he has no reason to." She breathed out slowly. "So I’ll tell you something that he would never want you to know. I’ve watched you for months, so I think that I owe you the end of the story."
Mav waited.
"I was 22 on the night your family died, and I was already working for him. My job was to watch the street." Her voice didn’t change at all. "Aldric Ashgrove held the door of your house. Lucan Pyrecrest lit the fire. But they didn’t choose your house, and they didn’t go in first."
The sea around them seemed to go very still.
"A third man went in before either of them. I never saw his face. He was old, and he wore black. Lord Pyrecrest stood aside for him, and I had never seen him stand aside for anyone." She looked straight at Mav. "When he went in, he asked for Elise Silkborn by name. He didn’t ask for your father."
Mav couldn’t speak. For eight years, he had collected the names of the people who had come to his house. He had never once heard of a third man, and the shock of it left him cold all over.
"That’s all I know," Rhea said. "It’s the truth."
He believed her. She had told him the truth because she was going to die, and she had decided to die owing nothing.
She closed her eyes.
Mav drove his harpoon into her chest, once, straight through the heart. He did it as cleanly as he could, because she had earned that.
The white plain faded under his feet, and the sea closed over him.